Posted on 06/04/2005 6:20:50 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
All roads in northwest Arkansas lead to Wal-Mart.' -- message emblazoned on a Wal-Mart store bag, circa 1965
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BENTONVILLE, Ark. - It's 10 a.m., and Todd Thomas has been up for five hours. Doing business with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. means that you have to get up early and this week is even busier than usual, with thousands of shareholders from around the world flooding into the northwest Arkansas town for the company's annual meeting yesterday.
From the window of his family-run business on Sam Walton Boulevard, Bentonville Copy and Ship, one can see the unassuming low-rise campus just up the road that houses Wal-Mart's home office.
"This used to be a little two-lane road in the 1970s," recalls Mr. Thomas. "Now it's five lanes, and it could be widened again. Where we are standing now was an old barn, and there used to be a trailer park across the road there beside the home office, and up the street there" -- he gestures to a 210,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter farther up Sam Walton -- "that was a swimming hole where we used to go as kids."
As Wal-Mart has grown to be the biggest corporation on Earth, with revenue of US$288-billion last year, so too has its home base. These days, it is difficult to tell where Wal-Mart ends and Bentonville begins.
"My church is real big, and I'd say pretty much everybody I've met there works for Wal-Mart or is a vendor to Wal-Mart," says Eileen Campanelli, a secretary and switchboard operator for the city of Bentonville who moved to the area from Idaho four years ago. "If you don't work for either of them, then you're giving them a manicure. All of the growth here, directly or indirectly, is attributable to Wal-Mart. I didn't move here to work at Wal-Mart, but I moved here because of the economic advantages that Wal-Mart has brought about."
In 1992, when company founder Sam Walton died, Bentonville's population hit 9,000. By 2001, Bentonville had swollen to 19,000 and Wal-Mart had supassed ExxonMobil Corp. as the world's largest corporation. Today, it is home to 28,000, says Richard Davis, director of economic development for the town's Chamber of Commerce, and the town is growing so fast the county is having a hard time keeping up with changing infrastructure demands.
"We are still trying to adapt to yesterday's needs in terms of water, sewage and roads," he says, noting Bentonville had 2,200 new utility customers last year. "But I can tell you this. Since 1998, the county has added 450 jobs a month; the unemployment rate is 3% [about half the national average] and we are contributing to the workforce of neighbouring states."
Reported to be the fastest-growing region in the United States behind Las Vegas, there are bulldozers along some part of just about every stretch of road in Benton County. Dozens of subdivisions are cropping up in the flat farmland that sprawls west of the city; new strip malls with tanning salons, dental offices, restaurants and espresso bars open each month, and commercial nodes are spreading down central highway 540 like leaves on a branch. The airport, built in 1998 to accommodate the flood of travellers arriving for Wal-Mart meetings, hit its 10-year flight-volume target in early 2004. Bentonville High School is spending US$20-million to double its size to 400,000 square feet.
While Wal-Mart holds firm to its founding principle of rock-bottom prices, housing prices in the heart of its hometown are soaring.
Among the town's newest residents are Ivy League-schooled employees of as many as 1,000 companies that supply consumer goods to Wal-Mart. Since 2000, when it was $97,000, the average home price has doubled. "These people came in from New York, L.A., and they were making these six-figure salaries and living pretty high on the hog for a while, but now it's hard to find a house for $200,000," said Mr. Thomas.
The term "Wal-Mart effect" has become part of popular business lexicon to describe the negative effects of the retailer's low-price credo: putting the squeeze on suppliers, crushing smaller competitors out of business and driving down retail wages worldwide. But in Bentonville, another kind of Wal-Mart effect is evident at businesses like Bentonville Copy and Ship, those enjoying the collateral benefits of the retailer's boom.
Bentonville Copy and Ship has been the busiest retail counter in the United States for Federal Express over the past four years, shipping more packages than any other store of its kind in the United States. It has four large delivery trucks, and has built up a large document services division to support suppliers who are making presentations to Wal-Mart, offering high-speed digital printing, binding and laminating. It employs a full-time graphic artist who takes digital photographs and lays out supplier presentations. In addition to the business it does with Wal-Mart, its supplier client base has grown from two accounts 13 years ago to more than 600 today.
"I would say the definite turning point in our business was 1996," said Mr. Thomas. "That's when we started doubling our previous year's sales growth, and that happened for about five years in a row. In the last few years, we've grown about 20% to 25% a year in an industry that averages 3% to 5% growth a year, so we're doing pretty well."
Most people living in the area work for Wal-Mart, or, like Mr. Thomas, have Wal-Mart as a customer. "If you think in terms of Wal-Mart being the foundation of Benton county, the building blocks on top of that are the suppliers and the third tier of that are the groups that serve those vendors: the packaging companies, marketing companies, computer tech companies," Mr. Davis said.
Thirty per cent of the workforce in neighbouring McDonald County, Mo., work in Bentonville as do 17% of the workforce in Delaware County, Okla. and more than 20% of the working population in Adair County, Okla.
It's not suprising that loyalty to the company -- or fear of it -- runs strong in Bentonville.
When asked about the retailer's impact on the region, many locals react initially with suspicion. Pride for the company Sam Walton built runs as deep as Bentonville's roots as a southern Baptist stronghold, and residents are touchy about hot-button subjects like the retailer's anti-union stance and other negative press the company has sustained in the past year.
Yeah but just remember Walmart is Eeeeeeeevil! To some that is.
There's nothing like free publicity! *wink*
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1385103/posts
(snip)
'Harry' Wu is famous in the States. He escaped from China after 19 years in a prison camp for holding 'counter-revolutionary' views, then conned his way back into the prisons to document the misery of forced labour. In 1995, Wu was jailed once more, but not before he had reported the appalling tale of slave labour.
Naturally, Wal-Mart has contracts with suppliers that say none of its merchandise should be made by slaves, prisoners or little children. But among its suppliers is Shantou Garment Trading Company, based in Guandong Province. The Trading Company uses factories in Shantou town: nothing wrong with that. But some of the Trading Company's manufacturing is also carried out in nearby Jia Yang prison.
Do any of Wal-Mart's goods come from the prison? The company says it would refuse to handle anything made in a prison, and no one suggests that it knowingly connives in supporting prison labour. Wal-Mart repeats the mantra that its contracts forbid it.
But there is a clear problem here. An associate of Wu helping to investigate the Trading Company was told that Chinese authorities explicitly prohibit the monitoring of production inside the prison. Hence it is virtually impossible for any buyer to establish for certain whether goods from the Trading Company have been made by prisoners or 'free' labour.
According to Wal-Mart, it has to rely on the word of suppliers when they say that goods have been made only by 'free' workers.
And outside China? Who makes the dirt-cheap clothes that fill Wal-Mart's shelves? Are the factories that supply the company staffed by properly rewarded adults? This has long been a sensitive topic for Wal-Mart. In 1994, former Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Ortega, author of the fearsome expose, In Sam We Trust, was taken round Guatemalan factories which supplied Wal-Mart. They were filled with smiling adult workers.
But Ortega had arrived secretly two weeks earlier, and managed to speak to the child seamstresses hidden from the official tour. (When the scandal was exposed, Wal-Mart cancelled its contract with the plant.) Furthermore, in 1996, Wendy Diaz of Honduras testified before Congress about the sweatshop where, as a 13-year-old, she earned 18p an hour making Wal-Mart label clothes.
Wal-Mart has been decidedly touchy when questioned about the use of child labour. Do children make its goods? The answer depends on how you define children. When reporters confronted chief executive David Glass in 1992 with photographs of 14-year-old children locked in Bangladeshi factories that supply the company, he replied: 'Your definition of children may be different from mine.'
But this was in the bad old days, before Wal-Mart published its Code of Conduct, which was meant to end abuses. Since then, the supply chain has been cleaned up.
Or maybe not. The National Labour Committee of New York has given The Observer an advance copy of a yet-unpublished report on manufacturing in Bangladesh. It lists Wal-Mart contractor Beximco as paying teenage seamstresses an hourly rate of 12p and their helpers 5p, both for an 80-hour week - half Bangladesh's minimum wage and way beyond the country's maximum 60-hour working week.
Wal-Mart told me this could not happen if contractors stuck to their word.
The Observer last week sought the views of Wal-Mart's former lawyer, Hillary Clinton, the 'little lady' Sam appointed to his board of directors. She did not return our calls to Washington.
(snip)
The Waltons are heavy contributors to the Republican party.
Hillary on the board is history.
If they contributed to Democrat party instead, they would not be viewed as "Evil" although it would cause problems in the Union faction of the party. But Unions are declining in the U.S.
Development in and around Bentonville is very nice and stands in startk contras to the rest of Arkanas.
**If you are part of the economically-dying Mom & Pop Americana, you are losing.**
Sam Walton got his start with his "Mom & Pop" store on B'ville's square and did well. There was another "dime store" on the NW corner of B'ville's square that could have done well but didn't want to take the chance. A few wears later,a small store appeared in the next town to us called WAL-MART. A VERY small store. Then it moved to a bigger store. Then to a large store. Now it's a supercenter.
There is nothing people hate than success.
Without WM, this area would still be a hick town backwater.
Land here is now so high, I can only wish my dad had kept all he bought in the 50's, but he could not make the payments at that time and let it go back to the origional owner.
100 Acres, $3000.00.
Today, it is worth over $1,000,000.00
***The Waltons are heavy contributors to the Republican party. ***
Yet when George H. W. Bush came for a visit in the early 1990's Sam told him he was going to support a local named Clinton.
Heh, never been to Arkansas myself. But I admit I changed my opinion of the state, thanks to Wal-Mart.
(Before, I thought Arkansas had nothing but trailer parks all over the place where Bill Clinton is from, no offense intended to FReepers who live in Arkansas)
**Development in and around Bentonville is very nice and stands in startk contras to the rest of Arkanas.**
You mean there is MORE to Arkansas than Benton and Washington counties?
I've been here off and on for 50 years and didn't know that. WHERE HAVE I BEEN! Oh yeah, Tulsa Ok and back home in New Mexico.
Have you been in a walmart lately? The kind of people that these stores bring in to shop (talking Baltimore here) is amazing. Bad english, un-educated, curse words every other word, and thats mostly directed at the kids from there own parent/gaurdian.... I can't even take my 12 year old into the brand new store because of the lack of respect of the other shoppers....
I recall reading that although WalMart primarily donates to Republicans, they still gave more to the other side than the left's hero Costco did.
I was there this morning, looked like the 100% typical cross section of humanity I usually run into in most places. Maybe Baltimore just sucks and a 100% typical cross section of Baltimore shouldn't include 12 year-olds.
Sam doesn't run Wal-Mart anymore. Sam is dead.
ALL his survivng children contribute to the Republican party.
I read the stats prior to the last election. You are mistaken. The Waltons contributed nothing to democrats.
Good! I'm glad to be wrong in this case. ;)
**Sam doesn't run Wal-Mart anymore. Sam is dead***
Well, of course he's dead. I saw him a year before he died.
HE supported Clinton. His family does not.
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